A Higher Path Imagined
by EndlessBlue
Summary: Season One AU.  Much doesn't make it to the church on time.  Marian follows through on a promise.


**A/N: **This story follows a what-if that I would have dearly loved to see happen for real on the show. What if Much didn't make it back to the church on time? Marian weds Guy, of course, and this short piece follows her thoughts as it happens. A follow-up was written that may or not be published on . I'm still trying to figure out if I want to continue this. It stands well enough on its own, but if you'd like to see some of the aftermath, look up Robin Hood Intercomm on Livejournal and you'll find my stories under the username 'secretchord.'

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><p>The priest's words make no sense to her. His voice is beautiful, clear as the church's bells, but she is somewhere else, somewhere far away, where maybe this isn't happening. On her horse, meandering through a forest dappled with sun and bird-call. Alone, by a stream, listening to it carry wishes and dreams into the dawn. With her father, at the dinner table, eating in perfect silence.<p>

She is anywhere but here.

The flow of Latin stops. It is like a rainstorm has suddenly dried up, and she becomes acutely aware that the church is silent. It is her time to speak. She stares at the floor, at the hem of her white dress, at the tips of his black boots, at the wasteland between them. It would take years to cross. Robin will rescue her before she has to take the first step.

"Marian?"

She hardly hears. His voice is distant thunder.

Outside herself, she speaks. She says things she does not understand, vows that aren't real since they are born from lies, words that mean nothing to a girl from Knighton, barely thirteen years old, sitting on the fence of her father's stables on a hot August afternoon. She can feel a slight wind on her face. The horses nicker. She says things about death and poverty and forever. Her mouth has gone numb.

The priest's song fills the air again for a moment. Then another voice breaks across her ears, still very far away, still hushed; she tries not to imagine she hears wonder in it.

The longer the ceremony continues, the harder it becomes to maintain the certainty that she will be saved. The doors remain closed. Too soon, a thousand years too soon, the priest asks for the ring.

His hand trembles as it touches hers. The ring is a millstone and it makes her hand, her whole body, feel too heavy to be supported by just her delicate bridal slippers. She thinks that he must feel it, too, the weight of the world, the consequences, all in silver and amethyst. But when she finally looks up, it is not fear she sees. It is relief. It is the proud spark of ownership. She should not have moved. She should not have looked. The urge to run becomes a sickness in her stomach.

She turns her head and her eyes move beyond the small gathering of witnesses. Her vision is filled by the two oak doors that are suddenly very close. But he takes her hand, pulls her away, down onto her knees and all she can see now is the white and red and gold of the priest's robes, and her pale hands, curled into one another as a prayer is said. The sickness becomes an ache. Her eyes well with tears that seem to come from a cold spring, bottomless, pure, refined through anger and guilt and hope and desperation, filtered to this finality. She stands. His lips brush her cheek.

The bells ring. The doors open. She is blinded by the sunlight.

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><p>His hands are very beautiful. Pale, large, long-fingered, almost delicate. She holds one of those hands and is grieved at how grounded it makes her feel. Amid the swirl of her futile fantasies, she is anchored, and his skin is too warm, his grip too firm to let her fly away into what-might-have-been. She stares at his hand around hers as they walk out of the church. Locksley somehow manages to put on a good face and celebrate. They shower her with flowers and smiles, but in the bright morning, their faces are too shadowed to allow an examination of their sincerity. For the first time in a long time, Marian lets her righteous care for the peasants be overtaken by a selfish need to hate them. They know nothing of her sacrifice. They know nothing of her tireless efforts to help <em>them<em>, the children and women who laugh at her now, the men who wink and grin. She blushes hotly and wants very much to take her hand from Guy's. With another easy lie, she slips out of his grasp and touches her head, feigning a need to soothe away a headache. He immediately dips his head closer to hers and asks if she is all right. His concern is almost breathless.

The walk to Locksley Manor has lost all familiarity. The dirt paths she knew so well are now roads leading somewhere else, for she is no longer young, and Robin is no longer there.

The shade of the manor is refreshing. She takes a deep breath and feels it swell into the very bottom of her belly, and then it freezes there as Guy puts a hand to her back and brings her into a tight embrace. It isn't until he releases her, quickly, shooting her a look that lets her know he felt her tenseness, that the breath empties. She offers him a smile in apology, trying to make it look bashful or maidenly. But this lie does not sit right on her mouth. The practice has gotten too old. It has worn her out. She lets the smile slip away as she realizes that the need for falsehood is practically gone. They are married. She is protected. She has proven herself in a way that he must always acknowledge.

In this, at least, she will still have some source of strength. In this, at least, she will still have some manner of power and influence.

Locksley celebrates. She drinks her wine and, when his hand comes to rest on her knee, grits her teeth behind a smile.

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><p>She already has her lines prepared. <em>It is too soon. I am scared. I am nervous. It is cold. Please; please, Guy. Please.<em>

If he must have her tonight (and he must, he will), then she is ready to protect both the Nightwatchman's life and her own. She will parry his wandering hands, lead him gently, coax him into accepting a very little so that she might live to give him more. The deep wound still seeps and bleeds. She has slipped away twice already to make sure it is clean and tightly bandaged. In the dark, she can distract him from her winces and careful, slow movements. Tomorrow she will find a way to create a story about some accident, some slip of the knife, some careless fall off the horse, and then she will no longer have to hide the burning ache in her flesh. Then she can heal in peace. And then the Nightwatchman can return.

Already her head is filled with all the good she can do as Lady Gisbourne. The people of Locksley will know generosity once more. Unhappy though she might be with her marriage, she clings to the promise of power, the ability to make things right for the people, for they are now _her _people. Her father will find good health again. Her sacrifice will mean something, and all without violence, without a single drop of blood shed. As she gently presses the new bandage, the sickness in her stomach begins to subside.

Something whistles through the air; she is familiar with this noise. She anticipates the thud and shudder as an arrow lodges into the wall behind her. She runs to the window and leans out, but no one is there. She finds a note attached to the arrow.

Her heart beats fast in her ears, a roar, a rush. It would be so easy.

Wind blows through the trees just beyond her window. Birds call to one another. The sky is endless. And it would be so easy.

But there are reasons for her decision, and Robin cannot make those reasons magically disappear. He cannot help her father through sheer force of will. He cannot be lord to the villagers of Locksley. And he cannot make a speech grand enough to convince her that abandoning her husband would be anything but cruel and godless.

After all the empty promises she has made, she is beginning to hate herself. Her duplicity has exhausted her. There is something definite and real about the freedom she has given herself by being true to her word. And that it makes Guy smile so softly whenever she catches his eye... She cannot help but want that adoration, cannot help wanting to maneuver herself so solidly into his heart that she can then pull his strings and make him into the good man she has seen glimpses of before. Suddenly, she is overcome with the full realization of her potential. It almost makes her smile; it almost makes it easier to turn away from the window, and from that other life, that other future which is just like her past - unalterably gone.

She is nothing if not practical, she knows. She has always striven to be everything that good women are not thought to be - rational, logical, even-tempered and deliberate in thought and action. It is with this same deliberation that has always been her governing mechanism that she smooths down her gown and takes the twenty-two steps downstairs, where she fixes something polite on her face, and plans the turn of her head, and calculates exactly how to meet her husband's eyes.


End file.
